Injured Soldiers and Pay Problems

Via Drudge, then USNews.com:

When the Army gets it wrong
Wounded soldiers often--too often--find themselves having to battle the Pentagon over pay mistakes
By Alex Kingsbury and Julian E. Barnes

Having nearly lost his life in Iraq, the 1st Infantry Division soldier became lost to the Army payroll system because of a paperwork snafu as he lay comatose in a veterans hospital near Chicago. As a result, an Army bureaucrat classified him as absent without leave and cut off his pay, as is sometimes done when the system loses track of a soldier. The theory is that a GI wrongly listed as AWOL will start shouting and then the issue can be resolved. "That may work for an able-bodied soldier," says Michael Hurst, a former Army finance officer, "but it doesn't work so well for a guy in a coma in Chicago."

The case of the AWOL grunt in the coma may be particularly egregious, but it exemplifies the widespread problems with an Army pay system that of-ten doesn't get the numbers right. The problems have imposed the greatest hardship on wounded soldiers, who have to battle over financial problems even as they cope with physical ones.

"Significant errors." The thousands of wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan have overwhelmed the Army's aging finance system. An internal audit conducted earlier this year by Hurst, then a captain in an Army finance battalion, showed that 82 percent of the 1st Infantry Division soldiers wounded in Iraq had "significant errors" in their paychecks. Based on his own investigation of 123 wounded 1st Infantry Division soldiers, and another examination of problems with soldiers stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, Hurst estimates in his March 2005 audit that up to 4,000 of the soldiers seriously injured in Iraq have encountered payroll problems. [snip]

Some may say that the folks working the Army's payroll system are only human, mistakes are made, no intention to create additional hardship on wounded Soldiers and their families, etc. However, of all the troops that desperately need peace of mind about their finances, wounded and recovering Soldiers need it the most. Mistakes, regardless of intention, are intolerable!

The problems result in part from the military's reliance on separate finance, medical, and personnel databases. The current system, designed in the 1970s, is so antiquated that sometimes data on a particular soldier must be manually extracted from one database for use in another. The Defense Department is trying to create a combined system, but the project has fallen behind because of the sheer complexity of the task.

The problems Hurst found in his audit include soldiers who were underpaid and overpaid. The payroll systems must keep up with factors such as combat pay and overseas cost of living adjustments--bonuses that eventually expire when a soldier returns home wounded. If not, the soldier can be overpaid for months, creating something of a windfall at a time when his injuries are creating unexpected bills for family members. At first blush, this doesn't seem so bad. In reality, though, it causes serious problems later on, when a soldier's pay is docked to offset the overpayments. "The service has no choice; they have to collect" the overpayment, says Cindy Williams, a military personnel systems expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But for people living month to month, it is very difficult for families to give the money back."

That's the complaint from Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq. He was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and then to a veterans hospital in Richmond, Va. While Simpson was in the Richmond hospital, his pay was suddenly reduced, then cut off altogether. One month the Army paid him $472, the next month nothing, and then he received a check for $870. It turned out the Army had docked his paycheck because he had been overpaid by several thousand dollars--since he was no longer overseas. But Simpson's wife and children were still living in Germany, where Simpson had been based, and his injuries were adding to their bills--meaning he had already spent the "extra" money. Simpson, now retired, feels he had earned the money the government took back. "I returned injured," Simpson says. "I wasn't on vacation. I was still fighting the same war. It's just that I wasn't in Iraq; I was fighting for my life." [snip]

Understandably, merging separate databases without interruption in services is extremely challenging, but it must be done. when I was a recruiter, I many times was asked about such information firewalls. For example, I'd call looking for Johnny Smith to ask him if he'd be interesting in finding out what the Army had to offer only to have mom or dad tell me that Johnny joined another branch months ago. Then mom or dad would ask, "how come you don't know that? Don't you work for the government?" Well, sure, but we don't share information like that between branches (though we should) and as this article points out, even within my own branch, communication of personnel information is difficult.

Cindy Williams is right, the military rightfully should collect any overpayments, but my problem is with the way it's done. (The military should be just as vigilant to pay Soldiers who were underpaid, as well.) To just arbitrarily dock a Soldier's pay, sometimes causing a "no pay due" situation, meaning that the Soldier receives no pay for that month, is very unfair. The Army usually overpaid the Soldier for over a period of time, say, several months. Then it takes the Army another several months to discover the overpayment. Since it took time for the problem to develop, the Army should be willing to take some time to solve it. Give the Soldier notification of the overpayment, give them a timeline of how long they have to dispute the problem, if necessary, and then a schedule of repayment that causes no more burden on the Soldier than it did on the Army. By that I mean that if the Soldier was overpaid $100 monthly for 6 months, then the Soldier should be given the option to pay it back at the same rate. I think that would be fair, afterall, Army leaders preach (and most practice) that caring for Soldiers is paramount to accomplishing the mission.

Part of the problem is that the Army pay stub is amazingly complicated to read, and advance warning that pay will be docked is anything but clearly presented. "I don't know a solution to the whole problem short of revamping the entire finance system, but in the meantime an easy fix is to make soldier's leave and earnings statements easier to read," says Jeremy Chwat, national policy director for the Wounded Warrior Project, a nonprofit veterans advocacy group. For his part, Hurst, now a law student at George Washington University, argues Congress needs to step in to simplify the pay and bonus system. "These soldiers . . . have been let down," he says, "and they deserve better."

Army officials say that Hurst's report is an objective and largely accurate account of pay problems. But they also say they've begun to fix the system. "I think we have made a lot of improvement," said Eric Reid, director of the U.S. Army Finance Command. "Is it foolproof? No." The Army is working aggressively to forgive the debts of soldiers who have been overpaid, he says. The Army has identified 331 wounded soldiers hit with debts. So far, Reid said, 99 soldiers have had debts suspended or waived. And bureaucrats now flag the payroll files of every soldier wounded in action, in an attempt to avoid problems.

But the short-term steps are only a piecemeal fix, and the integration of pay and personnel databases won't be completed until 2007--at the earliest.

Making the Leave and Earning Statement (LES, the military pay stub) easier to read and understand is great. Flagging payroll files of every Soldier wounded in action is also a great step towards avoiding pay problems. I think I have a recommendation that would help immensely in reporting pay problems and with Soldier/family peace of mind. My recommendation is that DoD (sure this article addresses the Army, but I'll bet all branches have seen similar problems, afterall, we all get paid by DFAS - the Defense Finance and Accounting Service) needs to put someone in the larger hospitals, like Walter Reed and Brooke Army Medical Center, from DFAS who can access information about any military members payroll account and answer questions about over/underpayments, bonuses, overseas/combat pay allowances, etc. If, as a wounded Soldier, I can go to this person or this person can come to me and answer questions, review my pay and ensure I'm being paid correctly, and address my concerns and issues while I'm in the hospital recovering, I'd be pleased, grateful even. For those troops receiving care in a facility other than the big military hospitals, there needs to be a hotline and internet site able to perform the same services. Sure, there's the customer service center on the DFAS website now, but obviously there's a need for something more.

Why does this concern me so much? Chances are that I'll be going to Iraq and if I'm injured, I don't want my family to have to worry about finances. Sure, I'm doing a few things to help mitigate possible problems, but my family cannot handle a few months of "no pay due". It would be devastating, financially and emotionally. Hopefully the attention of this article by US News as well as other folks will fix most of the problems, but I would like DoD to make a public commitment to completely erase this problem. Recovering troops deserve that.


Check basil's blog, Jo's Cafe, Indepundit, The Political Teen